Margaret Fuller Quotes: Sources, Meanings & Themes

Life Without and Life Within, Part I ‘Reviews,’ essay ‘Menzel's View of Gœthe,’ Project Gutenberg #39037. ‘For the soul seeks not adorers, but peers’ appears in Fuller's discussion of the youth of genius, mockers and worshippers, immediately contrasting blind worship with ‘intelligent sympathy.’ It remains nineteenth-century literary criticism and intellectual reflection rather than a universal social or relationship rule.

Life Without and Life Within, “The Poor Man”; Fuller argues that difficult experience can produce realistic knowledge of one’s resources and a grounded degree of self-reliance.

Summer on the Lakes, in 1843; the sentence appears in Fuller’s dialogic reflection on temperament, inquiry, and following the direction one’s own character requires.

Woman in the Nineteenth Century; spoken by Fuller’s illustrative figure Miranda while explaining the self-dependence encouraged by her upbringing.

Woman in the Nineteenth Century; Fuller connects the dignity of freely giving oneself in relationship with the prior ability to stand independently.

Woman in the Nineteenth Century and Kindred Papers; the sentence appears in advice about practical education, precision, and the development of the whole person.

Woman in the Nineteenth Century; Fuller explicitly names self-subsistence, self-reliance, and self-impulse within her argument about women’s independence.

Woman in the Nineteenth Century, in Fuller’s account of “Miranda”; this is the narrator’s description of the illustrative figure rather than a standalone autobiographical maxim.

Woman in the Nineteenth Century, in the discussion of Miranda; Fuller explicitly connects awakened self-respect with serenity and inward peace.